Scott's WeblogThe weblog of an IT pro focusing on cloud computing, Kubernetes, Linux, containers, and networking

Technology Short Take 102

Welcome to Technology Short Take 102! I normally try to get these things published biweekly (every other Friday), but this one has taken quite a bit longer to get published. It’s no one’s fault but my own! In any event, I hope that you’re able to find something useful among the links below.

Networking

Matt Oswalt, now at Juniper, has been recently trumpeting the idea of reliability as a core reason for automation. Here’s his latest piece. (For the record, I don’t disagree with much of what Matt has to say on this topic.)

Cloud Computing/Cloud Management

Joe Duffy takes the wraps off Pulumi, which looks very interesting. This is an area where I’d love to spend some time really digging in.

Interesting article here on Chick-Fil-A’s use of Kubernetes in their restaurants, and the tools/process they follow for establishing those clusters.

Jeff Geerling—well-known in the Ansible and Drupal communities—discusses the (perceived) complexity of Kubernetes. He spent some time actually working with Kubernetes to solve a problem, and he came away from that time recognizing (in his words) “most of the complexity is necessary,” and seeing value in using Kubernetes for appropriate use cases. This article is not (in my opinion) a knee-jerk reaction to some of the debate around Kubernetes’ complexity, but rather a measured and honest evaluation of a tool to solve problems.

Maish Saidel-Keesing has a two-part (so far?) series on comparing CloudFormation, Terraform, and Ansible (part 1, part 2). This is worth a read if you’re trying to determine which of these tools may be right for your use case.

Operating Systems/Applications

This is probably well-known, but I found this little tidbit about read-only containers handy.

This article on another reason your Docker containers may be slow was an excellent reminder that containerization is not equal to virtualization (that doesn’t make it better or worse, just different), and therefore can’t be treated the same. Different design and architecture considerations apply in each instance.

Lightroom is one of only a few applications that I keep around for macOS; this article gives me some alternatives.

Tom Sweeney also talks about Buildah and how it can be used to create small container images. My takeaway from this article is that building really small container images requires either a) arcane knowledge of Docker layers and the Dockerfile, or b) arcane knowledge of little-used yum parameters.

Virtualization

Ed Haletky documents the approach he uses to produce segregated virtual-in-virtual test environments that live within his production environment.

It seems as if there’s quite a bit of complexity in this article on using KubeVirt witih GlusterFS, but I can’t tell if that is a byproduct of KubeVirt, GlusterFS, or the combination of the two.

Career/Soft Skills

A couple of useful career-related articles popped up on my radar over the last couple of weeks:

First, there’s this article by Eric Lee on IT burnout. If you find yourself experiencing some of the same issues that Eric describes, I’d encourage you to take a deeper look and see if changes are necessary.

Next, Cody De Arkland tackles the topic of imposter syndrome. This is an area where I personally have struggled in the past, and I had to learn to humbly accept praise and stop negative self-talk. Talk to someone if you’re wrestling with this.

That’s all for now. Look for the next Technology Short Take in 2-3 weeks, and feel free to contact me via Twitter if you have any links or articles you think I should share. Thanks!